Daily Archives: March 18, 2011

I wouldn’t say that Ivan Maisel’s interview with Bill Hancock contains any big surprises, but once you get past Hancock’s nonsensical lip service about not letting a D-1 football postseason interfere with academics, it’s very, very obvious that the people running college athletics don’t trust themselves enough to stop bracket creep from screwing up the good thing they know they have.

John Infante’s rebuttal to the indentured servitude argument that gets thrown the NCAA’s way is so spot on I’m tempted to add “The Deal” to the Lexicon just so I can use it as shorthand in response to every future whine about paying student-athletes to play.

… The onus then in put on the NCAA to improve the deal it offers to student-athletes. And not just at the margins in terms of multi-year scholarships or better training. Rather, the NCAA membership is pressured to change the fundamentals of the agreement by eliminating the restrictions on profiting from one’s athletic ability and/or reducing or eliminating the academic requirements.

But it was not the NCAA who made the current deal offered to student-athletes the only one available. It was the NFL and NBA who took advantage of the fact that the NCAA operates the only 18-23 year old developmental league at zero cost to the professional league it feeds athletes into in the world. If Division I athletics were not played at the level they are, it would be both unconscionable and unprofitable to both bar high schoolers from entering the professional ranks and refuse to operate a minor league focused on development.

Now that’s not completely out of line in the sense that only six players on Low’s list return for 2011, but still, it feels different. How many times in the last decade can you say there wasn’t an elite quarterback in this conference coming back for another year?

Quote Of The Day

“Just because they tweet something emotional during that time, that doesn’t matter,” Smart contended. “It gives the other team motivation. But our team was motivated to play Texas. Texas outplayed us, outcompeted us. They outcoached us. They out-physicaled us. They did a lot of things better than us.” — USA Today, 1/2/19